Why every RPA organization needs a CI/CD Pipeline

March 30, 2020

A pipeline for your RPA deployments

Although many organizations have started implementing a Digital Workforce into their business operations – only a few are fully in control of their RPA bots. The primary shortcoming? A lack of proper tools and systems and above all processes to support their automation practices.

You should practice what you preach.

Maintaining high performing virtual workers goes beyond having skilled developers, they’ve to align to quality standards and practices to benefit from RPA to the fullest. In today’s series we will further evaluate the benefit of a CI/CD Pipeline and why it is so important.

A CI/CD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery) pipeline allows you to automate your robot delivery process. The pipeline will initiate the build from your version control system and after completing every step the package will reside within your Orchestrator, ready to be executed. It may sound like overhead, but it certainly is not – it will help you to always cover the steps required to successfully deliver a robot. These steps could be as simple as compiling your package and uploading it to the Orchestrator – but can also include code reviews, change board approvals and other steps you’ve defined building your Center of Excellence.

Here is an example pipeline we have built for a client with strict delivery principles.

Benefits of a CI/CD Pipeline

Always have the latest code available in your version control system

Often, we see that clients are struggling with their version control. With a pipeline, the only way to upload a package to the orchestrator is through committing your final version to the version control system.

Remain compliant and in control of your deployments

You can implement controls such as an approval flow or code reviews

Practice what you preach – reduce time spent on cumbersome tasks such as a deployment

Deployments can take up hours of costly development time, eleminate cumbersome tasks from your CoE

Want to learn more?

Implementing a pipeline can be done from any version control system such as Git, TFS and Subversion. In case you need help implementing your pipeline, please let us know – we have implemented many pipelines before. Let’s talk robots!